Buoy's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[A New Leaf]

Gonna comment on each element real quick:
Piano is good. Love the deep end of it. 0:16 was cool. Guitar sounds pretty great for what it is. Strings sound kinda, uh I guess I'll call it "raw", I didn't care much for them anyway. Bass is pretty blurry/muddy, sounds like there's a chorus or reverb there that it'd be better off without. Bassline is good though. I feel that the drums sound a bit out of place but I can't quite put my finger on it. Ending works fine. So yeah pretty okay, nowhere near some of your other works though of course.

Step responds:

Oh hey, thanks a lot for reviewing!

"Gonna comment on each element real quick:"

Gonna respond to each comment real quick.

"Piano is good. Love the deep end of it."

Haha I've gotten used to using this piano sample and mixing it so I know which frequency ranges to lower and how much reverb I need to put on it like the back of my hand.

"0:16 was cool."

Yeah that kind of transition was in my head for a while and I tried it for the first time here.

"Guitar sounds pretty great for what it is."

You know Virtual Guitarist doesn't give you much control (the strums are all presets and if you want your guitar to do different strums then you need to load up the guitar again and choose another one of the fairly limited strum presets). Still, on the bright side the guitars sound fairly awesome.

"Strings sound kinda, uh I guess I'll call it "raw", I didn't care much for them anyway."

I see. To be honest I didn't work on them much, I just added them there as a testament to the original version.

"Bass is pretty blurry/muddy, sounds like there's a chorus or reverb there that it'd be better off without. Bassline is good though."

I did add a tiny bit of reverb but you've got to have god ears to actually hear it so I think what you're hearing is the weird EQ I put on it. It's a soundfont so it sounds pretty bad and unrealistic (for example when you let go of a note the sample just stops really quickly, as if the string suddenly stops vibrating) and it had a really ugly plucking sound which I removed by obliterating a lot of its high/upper mid frequencies, making it sound blurry/undefined. Trust me, it sounds better than how it was :(.

"I feel that the drums sound a bit out of place but I can't quite put my finger on it."

I'm not used to doing these kind of drums in a piano roll. I usually do them in a step sequencer but I obviously can't do that with EZdrummer so maybe I messed up a little.

"Ending works fine."

Yay.

"So yeah pretty okay, nowhere near some of your other works though of course."

True that. My dad loved it though at least! The only mistake my brother did while drumming was missing a snare hit. It's probably due to the fact that he stays too close to the drums so that his fairly short leg can reach the bass drum pedal :P.

Thanks again dude!

[Feast]

If you were going for the feel of a small band I think you failed a little bit, you can't just put an entire string section in there occasionally and keep that 'cozy small band feel'. And when the different instruments have completely different amounts of reverb, that takes away from the realism as well. Some of the percussion, the string section and oboe-like thing have a colossal reverb setting on them, while whatever it is that is introduced at 0:40 seems to have almost none at all, so in my head that instrument is playing right in front of me, pretty much up my face, while the rest of the band is playing in the distance.

Tune fucking rocks though.

Step responds:

"If you were going for the feel of a small band I think you failed a little bit, you can't just put an entire string section in there occasionally and keep that 'cozy small band feel'"

Haha I KNEW someone would point that out. I initially wanted to keep a small band feel but I honestly couldn't find any way to make the part towards the end sound interesting so I threw in like eight cellos in there. I'm obsessed with that big epic sound so much that I really can't make anything simple and likeable (like your Hammock song for example). I'll have to work on that sometime.

"And when the different instruments have completely different amounts of reverb, that takes away from the realism as well. Some of the percussion, the string section and oboe-like thing have a colossal reverb setting on them, while whatever it is that is introduced at 0:40 seems to have almost none at all, so in my head that instrument is playing right in front of me, pretty much up my face, while the rest of the band is playing in the distance."

My deaf ear impairs me from properly mixing so I'm not able to spot stuff like this myself :c. Still, you're probably right!

"Tune fucking rocks though."

Sweet :3.

Thanks a lot dude. Your reviews are fantastic.

[OverBurn (MAC12 Entry)]

Love it, wonderful production. I always have trouble making wide guitars that don't drown out the lead.

RobSoundtrack responds:

Whatttt thanks Buoy
Means alot, especially coming from you, good sir.

[Jinn's Calling]

The length is excellent imo. Keep the file size down, flash animators are happy, etc. It'll probably use less space than a medium size bitmap image in a flash when it's compressed and that's good. But I agree that the windchimes are gonna get really tiring after a while, so I'd say kick one of them out and subdue the other one.

Oh and make a big ethnic epic out of it of course. ;)

Step responds:

Man, thanks a lot for reviewing! Always great getting feedback from you.

Removed the wind chimes now. I can't subdue the other one though since if I turn it down I'll be turning down all the bongos at the same time (EZdrummer has them all in one patch) and if I turn its velocity down it doesn't play the wind chime sound I want :(.

Oh well. Glad you think it's the right length. This is mainly just for a small conversation so I naturally didn't need it to be more than half a minute in length.

Thanks for reviewing dude.

[Enthalpy (Original Mix)]

Enthalpy was the most boring part of chemistry 1 I think. And I never got how some molecules could have negative enthalpy of formation while others had positive when the free atoms have zero enthalpy? And it really bugs me that you can't just look up the enthalpy for each kind of bond, add them up and then that is the enthalpy of formation for your compound because NOOOO all sorts of shit like oxidation states and angles between atoms creates a lot of tiny accumulating differences, and because you have the same situation for all sorts of other properties that molecules have, in the end you can't do anything with precision unless you have a big book with all the properties of all compounds ever, and then what if you're trying to make a new compound? You can't really know anything about it.

Oh, the song is cool though. Neat 303 thing. Careful with the master compression though, it's really harsh and sounds more like clipping than anything else.

AeroMusic responds:

lmao I hate chemistry so much - don't even get me started on it, how the f*** are you supposed to know a bond angle!! the course we're doing is a load of rubbish aswell. I was almost not gonna call this enthalpy cause I hate chem so much - but I thought it fit the song well

thanks buoy, yeah about the compression - I can only really hear it when on my headphones and just convinced myself its what the bass is meant to do lmao.

[Pico's Flub]

whoa man that was like

such a pico song

SineRider responds:

I was staring at a picture of pico the entire time I made this :o

[JazzStep 1]

Good idea actually but the mix is pretty sloppy, espeially in the more all-out dubstep parts. I imagine it might sound better with some tighter drums that arent from an acoustic kit, and eqing out some of the most abrasive frequencies in the forment bass. If your are after all going to make a jazzstep song you might as well try to make it somewhat accessible to listeners of both styles

sorohanro responds:

Good points, thanks for the feedback.
I'll see what I can do about those :)

[Masq and Buoy - Brunch]

excellent graphics

jpbear responds:

theyre not retro though

[Morocco]

Lol you could have just gotten some stock "ethnic"/middle-eastern music and used that. Love the song though, especially that whiny obo whatever thing that ends at 1:00. Cool soundstage with all the hifi and detailed percussion and brooding background stuff. And thankfully this is not anything like the awful annoying shit with howling women that I associate with the region. :D

Also how can anybody work together in a team of 15? Hopefully there is a clear leader of each team or you are 100% certain to end up in a state of utter anarchy

Step responds:

Hey thanks for reviewing!

"Lol you could have just gotten some stock "ethnic"/middle-eastern music and used that."

Yeah but then I'll have nothing to do. I mean I can write a script but they probably want it in Maltese and I'm crap at Maltese. I can program but I don't see how we'll be needing programming for the project. I can research stuff but that's insanely boring. So making music saves the day :3.

"Love the song though, especially that whiny obo whatever thing that ends at 1:00."

I think that's a zourna you're talking about. Yeah it's pretty cool!

"Cool soundstage with all the hifi and detailed percussion and brooding background stuff."

That's good to hear!

"And thankfully this is not anything like the awful annoying shit with howling women that I associate with the region. :D"

Yeah haha, when I searched for Moroccan music to get inspiration from, I found this...
http://goo.gl/msnVK

And I thought "oh no, not this howling crap". Then I found this...
http://goo.gl/Eq8r5

And I thought "that's more like it" :D.

"Also how can anybody work together in a team of 15? Hopefully there is a clear leader of each team or you are 100% certain to end up in a state of utter anarchy"

Yeah there's a leader or as you said, chaos would ensue. Also our team's 10 not 15, since there aren't exactly 150 students in our lower year school and it didn't dawn on the school staff that making each team full of 15 students will most likely cause one team to have a lesser amount of students.

Still, I would've totally preferred a solo project. I hate teamwork :(.

Thanks a lot for the review though!

[Courage de la Waffle]

Man I like violins like these that are kinda nasty on their own but get a lot of character in a mix. The soundfonts sound a lot like RPG midi which is excellent if that's what you're going for, not so much if you're going for a purist orchestral sound. Especially noticeable in fast, quantized staccato runs and percussion. Really enjoyed the song though, good composition, strong melodies. Great harmony. Love all that

Wurfel-Waffles responds:

Thanks for reviewing SBB.

Soundfont's strings are hard to use but some samples give pretty creative sounds if known the right piece. I think blackattackbitch's SF are probably the most well packed samples in the Soundfonts universe. Well, they are free stuff.

Very hard to find easy-to-use free stuff. Perhaps none good easy-to-use free stuff, at all.

There are some off keys. I'm not an excellent tracker user on Linux. Pitches run off often, still don't know why.

Thanks again for this well-written review, SBB. Good day.